


The Beckoning

by pingnova



Category: Welcome to Hell - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Animal Death, Big Bang Challenge, Bittersweet, Blood, Childhood Memories, Coma, Death, Dreamscapes, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, Post-Canon, Second Chances, Sock-centric, Suicide Attempt, Touch-Starved, is this a fix-it fic??
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-30
Updated: 2018-07-30
Packaged: 2019-06-11 10:25:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15313473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pingnova/pseuds/pingnova
Summary: It was in his head. None of it was real. This wasn’t Heaven, or Hell, or anywhere between. This was just him.Sock begins to experience strange sensations that lead him to discover he’s not as dead as he thought. He has a chance to be human again, but only if he can face himself.





	The Beckoning

**Author's Note:**

> First thing to note: no, this isn't that type of coma fic. I can almost guarantee you've never read a coma fic like this. At least, I haven't.
> 
> Big thanks to everyone who helped make this fic come to life, especially Penn and a-series-of-misfortunes for the wonderful art. [Check out the amazing art here!](http://pingnova.tumblr.com/post/176464100466/the-beckoning) I also put together [a short mix of the songs that helped inspire me](https://playmoss.com/en/andy-anderson/playlist/the-beckoning). Thanks to everyone on the W2H Big Bang team for all the hard work setting this up and the people on the W2H Discord server for commiserating over writing. Y’all rock.
> 
> I wasn’t positive if this should be tagged Post-Canon or Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, because at the time of writing W2H2 has not been released so it is post-W2H1 canon, but I’m sure when W2H2 is out, this will read as a canon divergence AU. So I just tagged both.
> 
> This work uses a unique “skin” which is styled with CSS. It’s optimized for Chrome and Internet Explorer but should function on Safari, Opera, and Firefox as well. If for some reason your device displays the skin incorrectly or you simply find it too distracting, scroll to the top of the page and click the “Hide Creator’s Style” button to revert to the default site skin.

> What good are bodies anyway?  
>  Why couldn't we arrange it, pray,  
>  To do away with flesh and bone  
>  And drift wherever we are blown,  
>  Each in his simple soul alone?  
>  What good are bodies anyway?
> 
> \- _Pittsburgh Daily Post_ , Pennsylvania, January 24, 1923 (Yesterday's Print)

[A]

It was like the clear bell above a shop door, cutting through the noise, through everything. Sock homed in and said, "What is that?"

Jonathan didn’t ask what he meant, probably because he didn’t care. Kicked out of his room by his mom for a "deep cleaning through the caked on grime," he sat aimlessly in an empty park, texting and listening to music. Normally Jonathan’s distraction might sting, but Sock was too focused on the beckoning. Like overhearing his name, he couldn’t help but attune his senses to it. It was a constant, rhythmic frequency he seemed to hear with his ears but also felt in his lungs and his throat. Fading in and out but never stopping, it pressed against his insides and pushed him. Leading him somewhere.

Jonathan took off his headphones and listened for a second. "I don’t hear anything."

Sock shook his head. Of course Jonathan couldn’t hear it. This he knew instinctively: it was Sock’s beckoning. He took the seat next to Jonathan on the wet park bench but wasn’t bothered by the cold rain gathered on the wood. He wasn’t really sitting, only giving the illusion of it, floating just above the bench in a seated position so familiar but so unnecessary now that he was a demon.

"It’s like ringing," he said.

Jonathan slipped the headphones back over his ears. "You just have tinnitus."

Sock had a feeling demons didn’t get tinnitus but he didn’t refute Jonathan. Instead he said, "We’re both bored, let’s do something about it."

[B]

Jonathan merged on to the freeway as Sock directed and turned up the volume on the radio when a Valhalla Soundbox song came on. Despite Sock’s intangible state, Jonathan still lectured him about doing anything untoward to his mom’s old sedan. Don’t leave garbage on the floor, don’t put your feet up on the dashboard, don’t smudge the windows, or she would kill him. Sock was careful to follow all instructions just in case. Jonathan couldn’t kill himself if his mom got there first.

Pressure formed in Sock’s torso, settling in his guts like a ball of lead. He felt that if he was alive it might be distressing. But since he didn’t need to breathe and had all sorts of inhuman abilities that sometimes felt strange, he simply noted the feeling with a puzzled frown. The pressure shifted right and Sock pointed to the next exit. Jonathan flicked on the blinker and changed lanes.

They drove for close to an hour. The ringing didn’t get louder, but it got even sharper. The pressure was constant, only changing to push him in another direction, like the pointer of a compass.

The sedan sped past a state border and two cities before Sock called for a stop.

"What?" Jonathan said, an hour’s worth of annoyance packed into a single word. "You usually act weird but now you’re being really strange. Where are we, Sock?"

Sock pressed against the passenger window to satisfy the pressure. To the right of the car was the sparse parking lot for a local hospital. He would have stopped breathing if he had working lungs.

 _St. Mary’s Hospital, East Campus_ , read the sign.

That hospital was minutes from his house. They were in Sock’s old town, from before he died. He suddenly had a horrible premonition about why he was lead here. Feelings in his throat and lungs, hearing things. It was like he was experiencing two places at once. Like another part of him was calling him back.

"Pull into the hospital," he told Jonathan weakly.

Jonathan gave him a funny look but was either really bored enough to do what Sock wanted or actually concerned by Sock’s unusually feeble tone, because he parked and walked inside.

"Now what?" Jonathan said in the empty lobby. "And don’t think I’m going along with whatever you want to do ever again. Hospitals are freaky."

"Can’t be as freaky as me," Sock countered, leading them toward the nurses station. "Ask for _Sowachowski_."

Jonathan did. Before the nurse confirmed or denied anyone by that name was in the hospital, she asked Jonathan’s relation. It looked like it pained him about as much as eating hot lava, but Jonathan said he was a friend. Sock’s lips twitched into a full smile and Jonathan grimaced when he caught sight of it.

The nurse gave him a visitor’s badge after logging his information and pointed him toward B418. Up, left, left, right, she said. Although they wouldn’t have needed her instructions because Sock felt the push in the general direction increase tenfold when Jonathan began making his way to the room, until invisible hands were practically shoving him down the hall.

B418 was through the double doors to the long term care ward. The wide empty hallways echoed with Jonathan’s footsteps. No one visited this area but nurses. There were no windows into the room, so neither of them could get a preview. Sock stopped outside the door, making out the intricate patterns in the wood, and maybe panicked a little. Or a lot. He laid a hand on his heaving chest and sagged against the wall.

"Sock," Jonathan said. "Sock, I can’t believe I’m about to say this because I’m pretty sure you don’t need to, but, breathe. Just breathe."

Sock finally touched down on the tile and put a hand on the wall, careful not to make phantom contact with any part of the door. He curled a fist into the vest over his chest, trying to focus on calm things like flat lakes and empty green gardens. 

Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in…

"What if it’s my dad?" He said to Jonathan, who hovered nearby with crossed arms and only a little furrow in his brow to betray his worry. "Or my mom?"

He didn’t think he could face them. Their anger, their despair, or, worse, their disappointment.

But what he didn’t ask was most telling: _What if it’s me?_

Jonathan didn’t know anything about Sock’s life before he was assigned to him. He wouldn’t know why Sock would be terrified that he or his parents might be in that room. That was the issue. Jonathan didn’t know anything and Sock wished he never had to.

They had become close over the past couple weeks. Sock didn’t think they were soulmates or anything, but it was the most intimate relationship he’d had since childhood. Probably nobody knew that better than Mephistopheles, who endured Sock’s moaning about his abilities as a demon and Jonathan’s apathetic attitude. Moaning which morphed into gushing about the little things that made Jonathan Jonathan as time went by.

Mephistopheles peeked over his paperwork with eyebrow raised. "You really like this guy, huh?"

Sock, only now realizing that getting attached to his first assignment might be against the rules, or at least looked down upon, backpedaled. "Yeah, I mean, he’s cool. But if he trusts me it’ll be easier to get him to punch his own ticket, right?"

"Right, I have faith in your abilities," Mephistopheles agreed, but he contemplated Sock for a few seconds too long. "You'll get your chance with him."

Sock was quick to leave after that.

Jonathan had a mellow way of showing it, but he really did care about Sock. He could see it when Jonathan reached out and touched him for no reason. Just a hand on his shoulder or flicking at the tail of his hat. They both realized that Jonathan dictated touch, that Sock could only make contact as Jonathan wanted. But that hadn’t caused him to shut Sock out completely. Rather, he seemed to go out of his way to make Sock feel corporeal for a moment.

Sock knew Jonathan would grumble if he said anything about it, so he didn’t, but he did smile in thanks. It was sweet of him.

Would Jonathan still touch him if he found out?

"Do you want me to see what’s in there first?" Jonathan offered.

Sock clenched the hand against the wall and floated into the air again. He could do this. "No, I got it."

He phased through the door.

Inside was dim. The walls were bare and powder blue. A fluorescent light buzzed faintly over a single bed, but the sound was almost completely drowned out by the beckoning. If before it had been insistent, now it was adamant, hooking into somewhere deep at his core and pulling him inexorably toward the bed. It was a body, of course, under the hills and valleys of white hospital blankets. The head was obscured by monitors and equipment mounted on poles.

Sock moved to see it and the sound intensified, like he was in a tower filled with tiny sharp bells calling out across the countryside in celebration. He imagined it was the tinkling, celestial voices of pinprick stars. It should hurt, should be a strange sound he’d never heard before. Instead, it felt like everything familiar. Like coming home.

It was like he was looking into some sort of demented mirror. Dwarfed by the white pillows propping the body up was Sock’s sleeping face, pale and covered in wires and tubes.

[C]

"So, this is you," Jonathan said. He stood at the end of the bed, hands in the pockets of his oversized gray hoodie, impassive in the face of another Sock under the blankets. "I mean, you’re you too, but this is also you. This is just your body?"

Sock hovered for a moment, unsure, then took a seat on the edge of the bed. It was his body, he didn’t need its permission to sit down. It was him.

That’s what he told himself. _This is you, it is you, that’s me_. But it was hard to believe.

The body seemed very small on the bed, like a doll laid on an adult’s mattress. Usually Sock had pale peachy skin, but it was bleached white as flour and had a slight waxy sheen. It had lost fat in the cheeks and there were dark circles under the eyes. If it weren’t for the rhythmic rise and fall of the chest, he’d think it was dead.

The ringing synced with the breathing of the body. A breath in or out—bells. This close, it was like a symphony, and he was directly in the midst of the orchestra. The sound filled his lungs with the cadence of staccato, elated music.

"Too bad they discovered the cure for cowlicks after you died," Jonathan said.

And, yes, the body’s hair was neatly parted to the side. There was no volume, only slight curls at the ends suggesting that the hair had ever held any life at all. As embarrassed as he was by his perpetual cowlick, the body looked wrong without it. Diminished, somehow. It was easy to see that even if this was his body, Sock was not there.

Jonathan picked up the clipboard at the end of the bed and flipped through the pages, skimming across diagrams and jargon he couldn’t read.

"What’s it say?" Sock finally said through the noise.

Jonathan returned to the first page, lips pursed into a thin line. "It says you’re in a coma but that the wound in your torso has healed completely." There was heavy silence after he spoke.

This would be the first time Jonathan had really confronted the physical reality of Sock’s apparent death. He’d seen Sock’s "spookyhole" plenty of times but it had probably just been another weird part of a weird ghost. Now, it was made flesh and blood. Sock could feel Jonathan’s focus on him, asking for an explanation. Jonathan didn’t know how he’d died.

 _Died_. But Sock hadn’t died, because here was his body—alive. 

Sock reached out and put a hand over the body’s chest. It tingled with the proximity, growing heavy as though it was being magnetized to the flesh. Lowering the hand, he tried to make contact, but it went through the blankets and into the body.

The symphony silenced all at once and the quiet of the hospital and beep of the monitors were like a shock of freezing water. Sock panicked and pulled back out, terrified that he’d lost the beckoning, he’d lost home, but the bells flooded back into his lungs.

"Ooookay," Jonathan said, drawing out his incredulity and slowly putting the clipboard back. "What are you doing?"

Sock clutched his hand to his chest like he might lose it if he let go, watching the body as the panic wore off.

"I was just—" He looked between Jonathan and the bed. "I can’t touch myself."

Jonathan smirked. Sock glared.

"Pull up my shirt," Sock demanded.

Jonathan lifted his hands like he was warding off a ravenous bear, a teasing glint in his eyes. "Woah, hey, I don’t think we’re at that point yet—"

"Jonathan, I just want to see where the stab wound was."

Jonathan pointed, eyebrow raised. "You want me to lift the shirt off your unconscious body?"

"Yes."

"As long as you say so," Jonathan grumbled, moving to the other side of the bed. He peeled back the blankets, careful of the tube up the nose and the wires clipped to the skin, and revealed a pale green hospital gown. Eyes conscientiously averted, he pulled it up out of the blankets gathered at the waist, which revealed the body’s torso.

Sock hovered above it, tracing the wide line of pink scar tissue with his eyes, since he couldn’t touch. It looked painful, the flesh knitted together by ugly bubbled skin two shades off from the surrounding skin. It had hurt when he had inflicted it but he never got the chance to really look at it in all its gory splendor.

Jonathan set down the edge of the gown and took a step back in time for a nurse to enter the room.

"Sir!" she exclaimed, stalking toward the bed.

Jonathan held up his hands with a mild deer in the headlights expression. He couldn’t exactly explain that her comatose patient’s ghost had told him to do it.

"Sorry," Jonathan offered, scrambling for a moment to think up an excuse. "I just… He was my friend and I was curious."

The nurse, a short woman with a curly brown bob and scrubs covered in cartoon characters, pulled the gown back down Sock’s body and readjusted the blankets, only flashing Jonathan a short glare. She didn’t deign him with a response.

Jonathan lowered his hands and glanced at Sock, looking for direction. Sock raised an eyebrow as if to say, _Well? Go on_. Jonathan scowled but addressed the nurse on Sock’s behalf.

"What’s wrong with him?"

The nurse adjusted a few knobs and checked the monitors as she responded in a curt, scolding tone. "He tried to kill himself. You’d think a friend would know that."

Jonathan did manage to look and sound properly chastised as he mumbled an apology. If he was shocked by Sock’s manner of "death," he didn’t give it away. He simply watched the nurse expectantly as she pursed her lips. With a heavy sigh, she turned from the equipment and faced Jonathan, arms crossed. Her face softened as she looked between the body and Jonathan. Sock could almost hear her thoughts. Friends, and one had done something desperate and stupid. At her meaningful look, Jonathan’s cheeks pinkened.

"His heart stopped but they revived him," she said. "The doctors kept him in a medically induced coma for multiple major surgeries but he never woke up. They can’t find anything wrong with him, he’s shown signs of brain activity. They think…" She trailed off, watching the body on the bed with sympathy. "They think at this point that the cause must be psychological."

"You mean, he doesn’t want to wake up?" Jonathan clarified.

The nurse nodded, reaching to tuck a curl behind the body’s ear. Sock wrung his hands as he watched the gentle gesture. Noticed how casually she did it, like this wasn’t the first time. He couldn’t feel it, but it was still theoretically a part of him she did that to.

The only person who had touched Sock outside of Hell since becoming a demon was Jonathan. But knowing that this nurse may have been carefully making contact this whole time… That he couldn’t feel it… That it wasn’t really him… That even when people tried, he was totally unreachable, completely beyond help…

"Poor boy doesn’t have any visitors, no wonder he’s in such a state. You keep visiting. You give him something to wake up for. Okay?"

Jonathan flickered a look at Sock, too quick for the nurse to suspect, expression unreadable. "Okay."

She went the end of the bed, made some notes, nodded again at Jonathan, and left Sock alone with the body, his counterpart, and a lot of wide empty space filled with Sock’s tinkling beckoning.

Jonathan shoved his hands into the pocket of his hoodie and didn’t look at Sock when he said, "Suicide, huh?"

Sock tangled his fingers over his chest. He imagined that if he was alive, his stomach would be churning, he would be tense, his heart would flutter like he’d often felt in trapped rabbits. As it was, everything got a little whiter, like his vision was trying to compensate for all the panic responses his physical body couldn’t. All he could see was the still body laid out on the bed, the picture of serenity while Sock’s thoughts whirled.

"Yeah," he managed to squeeze out. He cut off a strangled laugh, the beckoning vibrating against his sternum. "Looks like I even messed that up." _I mess everything up_ , he didn’t say. _In life and in death_.

Weight settled on his elbow. Jonathan cupped his arm, warming whatever served as Sock’s skin these days. His brow was drawn, he looked stricken. Sock tried to ward off the pity, the speeches about how he had so much to live for. With a sigh he started to say, "Jonathan, I don’t—"

"I just wanted to say," Jonathan interrupted. "I meant what I said to the nurses. I am your friend."

Sock hung there, suspended in the moment, with his mouth still open to protest anything Jonathan would say, while he tried to process what had just been handed to him. Jonathan was his friend. Jonathan "Get Out of My House" Combs. With a blinding smile and zero forethought, he reached out and hugged him. It was more like a vise squeezing the life out of Jonathan, and his counterpart released a startled, "Oof," and then, "Sock, I can’t breathe. Geez, you’re strong."

Sock released him with an excited little hand flap. Jonathan was his friend! His first since childhood. Maybe even his first ever, depending. This was amazing, it was unbelievable.

Finally.

"I should try to kill myself more often if it gets me friends like you." Sock winked.

"I’ll disown you if you do that," Jonathan replied, not even a hint of a smile on his face.

"I forgot you have no sense of humor."

"I do, it’s just not as morbid as yours."

Sock shrugged amiably. Couldn’t argue with that. A grin still stretched his lips impossibly wide, only encouraged by the cheery tinkling of the beckoning, which was no longer faded to the background with Sock’s blind panic. It was back full force and he could have danced to it, he felt so light and free.

"So, can you, like…" Jonathan gestured awkwardly toward the body. "Go back in…?"

High on his giddiness, Sock drew closer to the body. Seated on the mattress, legs phasing through the side rail, he was close enough to distinguish the pores on its face and each lash across the protruding cheekbone. He could even make out faint, even breathing.

"I don’t know," he heard himself say. 

The closer he got, the more the beckoning sang. Backup choirs joined in, holding a perfect, hypnotic harmony. He leaned in as if he were falling into a hug. The same pull he felt as his hand hovered over the body’s chest brought him even closer, like the teeth of a zipper snapping together, making two things one inch by inch.

He couldn’t touch, he knew that. If he tried he would lose the beckoning. But each move closer built up the crescendo. He was almost forehead-to-forehead now, and he ached to touch, to feel something. The oil on the body’s forehead, each puff of breath, the hair tickling his skin. If he reached out just enough, he could feel.

The pull became irresistible. It felt like everything familiar. Like coming home.

If Jonathan said any more, Sock didn’t hear. He tipped forward the last few inches and disappeared.

[D]

A wide, vacant, newly-paved street. The sky was pinkish with dusk. Young trees stretched toward the sidewalks, evenly spaced. Eerily so. Behind the trees, clapboard houses in all shades of pale pink and brown and yellow, like Neapolitan ice cream. Each side of the street was identical. A perfect suburbia. 

But it was empty. No young parents walking strollers down the street or children shouting as they made make believe. There wasn’t even the sound of wind in the trees or birds in the air. Just the weight of a silence on his shoulders, deafening after the beckoning’s symphony.

It was only him.

Sock stood with one foot on either side of the broken center line, right on the edge of the mirror world. Cautiously, he settled to the left with a gripping fear that now that he had broken the symmetry, the image would collapse around him.

Nothing happened, except that Sock realized he had not been here mere seconds ago. He had been with Jonathan in the hospital, investigating the beckoning. The whole reason he had tumbled toward his body was to get closer to that sound, and now everything was silent. He didn’t even know where he was.

Tugging the ears of his hat in frustration, he looked from side to side, seeking anything familiar. He hopped off the ground so he could float, but instead crashed back to the pavement with a shock of pain, knees catching on the loose gravel, hands flailing out to catch his upper body before his face cracked into the blacktop.

Stunned, he laid on his side for a minute, lifting his hands before his eyes. They were scratched, even bleeding in some places. It pulsed—it hurt. His knees too. But his eyes weren’t wide because of the pain. 

He took a sharp breath—it burned.

He rolled to a sitting position—the pavement held the day’s heat against his bare arms.

He stood and jumped one more time, landing perfectly now that he knew what to expect. There wasn’t any doubt: he was corporeal. He was real. He could touch and feel.

He freaked out.

"Jonathan!" he called, swirling several revolutions to project his voice as far as it would go. " _Jonathan!_ "

More silence. Not even an echo.

Sock balled his shaking hands over his chest, gasping, willing away the sting of the cuts. With a sudden urgency, he slipped a hand under his shirt and felt the skin of his torso. To confirm, he lifted the fabric and gaped at the unblemished skin where his spookyhole should have been. There wasn't even a scar.

To his utter horror, a tear slid down his cheek. Not in anger. Not in grief. He didn’t feel much of anything, aside from jittery and confused.

_Shock_ , his brain supplied. 

How did this happen? Had he really somehow reunited with his body back at the hospital? Is that why the beckoning was gone? But where was the scar? Where was Jonathan? Where was he?

"What’s going on?" he asked no one in particular.

He didn’t get an answer, but Jonathan’s voice cut through the quiet. Just a faint, "Sock?" from behind. Sock whirled to meet him, but it wasn’t Jonathan that stood behind him at all.

Two average-looking people, a man and a woman, one in a yellow sundress and the other in a plain white T-shirt and casual slacks. The sunset made them red, stained their skin and clothes, like the last time he’d seen them. They beckoned (they beckoned!) and began walking down the symmetrical street.

Wide eyed and completely at a loss for words, Sock followed his parents home.

[E] 

"Napoleon," his mom scolded, gently tipping his palms back and forth to survey the damage. "I told you not to run. You always trip and get hurt."

Sock winced as she applied a sharp-smelling liquid to the cuts. He was seated at the kitchen table, absently scratching at the familiar scuff marks on the surface with his free hand. "I…" he began, watching her wrap a clean bandage around his hand. He wasn’t sure how to talk to her, this woman who should be dead, should be mad or at least disappointed, but clearly wasn’t, was instead leading him home and taking care of his injuries. "I didn’t run. I thought I could fly."

She laughed warmly and Sock’s cheeks burned. It sounded silly like that.

"I guess you found out that you can’t fly," she said as she sealed the last bandage.

"I used to be able to," Sock insisted, growing a bit desperate. "I don’t know what happened. I don’t know what’s going on."

With a light pat to his cheek, Sock’s mom crouched to his level and commanded his gaze. Her eyes were that weird shade of green he had inherited, almost neon in the right light. They were laser focused and not at all lifeless and staring at the sky because of him. She was alive. He was alive.

"Nobody really knows what’s going on, Napoleon," she said. "But I know you’ll figure it out."

She gathered up the supplies and Sock swallowed, throat suddenly thick. Scared to even voice the thought.

"Is this Heaven?" he managed in barely a whisper.

His mom stopped in the doorway of the bathroom and gave him one last look. Framed by the brighter light above the sink, he could only see one eye through the shadow. It was fond, but distant.

"Probably not," she said offhand. Like she was relaying a slight change in weather and not pronouncing the fate of his immortal soul.

Sock nodded, eyes on his bandages, rubbing the coarse texture with a thumb. Of course not. There wasn’t a Heaven for him.

So where was he?

[F] 

"Is this a new branch of Hell where they torture me by making me eat your cooking again?" Sock said as his dad served him a blackened sloppy heap of what was supposed to be lasagna.

"Napoleon," his mom admonished. His dad just laughed.

Sock stared at him. He was practically a stranger. They both were.

Not just because he’d last seen them stabbed to death and covered in their own viscera. He still couldn’t get his first impression of them soaked in the red from the sun out of his head. It was because before all that, they had never looked this carefree and happy. Not to mention young. Too young for how old he was.

"What year is it?"

"2009," his dad offered. 

That made him seven years old. He looked down at himself and examined his arms. Definitely didn’t look seven. Did he go back in time somehow?

"How old are you?" Sock said. 

"33, almost over the hill." His dad chuckled at the joke, a comforting, warm sound, that belonged in a cozy little house like this.

They had no idea what was coming.

Sock poked at the lasagna once and left his fork stuck in it. "I’m not hungry." And it was true. He didn’t feel any hunger, despite everything. Not that this dinner was overly appetizing in the first place.

"Off to bed with you, then." His mom took his plate and waved him toward the stairs.

Sock pushed his chair back and turned around.

Towering trees lined his vision, planted in industrial rows on an invisible grid. Short, green grass carpeted the spaces between. Above, white clouds swirled through a baby blue sky, only visible in glimpses through the leaves. In the near distance stood a colorful playground structure bereft of children.

Sock was positioned between the trees, in the same spot as he was in the house. But when he turned around, there was no kitchen and dining room. Just more trees and darkness beyond. It was like a stage crew had changed the scenery around him in half of a split second. 

His mom twisted over a bench near the playground and gestured. Calling to him.

For a moment he forgot about his confusion and scowled at the name. He’d been too preoccupied to protest before, but now he had calmed. There was no Napoleon here, only Sock. And he told her so once he was close enough. His mom laughed and told him to play.

"I’m a little old for that," Sock grumbled.

"Dear, you’re only seven. Don’t grow old too fast."

Right. In whatever reality this was, they saw a seven year old boy, not what he really was. Still, he hovered by his mom, who soon pushed him bodily toward the sandbox. He felt less awkward there, since he wasn’t really a child. At a pointed glare from his mom, he heaved a put-upon sigh and started pushing sand around.

As he "played," he took in his surroundings. The forest was full of endless symmetry, trees in straight lines in every direction. Like a maze of mirrors reflecting themselves. The darkness between the trees chilled his bones. It gaped wide and empty, and Sock felt that there was nothing beyond his sight, that it was a void outside the park and the trees, somewhere he might not return from if he tried to go.

Disturbed by the strong feeling he was getting from some shade, he returned his focus to the park. It was the only asymmetrical part of the setting. Did that mean anything? He had vague memories of this place from his early childhood. It was Bandimere Park, which was a short walk down the street from his house, in the opposite direction of the graveyard. His gut tightened at the thought.

His name ghosted by his ear. Sock almost mistook it for a breeze at first, but the hard K sound got his attention fast. No longer messing with the sand, Sock sat back on his heels and peered around the vacant park.

"Sock…" he heard again. It was garbled a bit, soft and echoing like a bad radio connection, but it was definitely Jonathan.

"Jonathan?" Sock whispered. Then, shouting, "Jonathan!"

Sock winced and watched his mom, but she hadn’t taken any notice, too busy reading a paperback novel and chewing her thumbnail.

"Hey, Sock," said Jonathan, clearer this time. "I don’t know if you can hear this, but I figure I should try. The nurses said it’s good to talk to you either way."

"I can hear you!" Sock called back. His cheeks hurt from his wide, relieved smile. But Jonathan continued like he hadn’t heard.

"So, yesterday we followed that weird feeling you got to this hospital and you merged with your body, or something. I hope that means you’re in there getting the systems back online so you can wake up. Or that you can get back out if that doesn’t work."

Sock stared into the sand, since he had nowhere else to look. Jonathan confirmed it—he was inside his body. The neighborhood, his parents, the park… It was in his head. None of it was real. This wasn’t Heaven, or Hell, or anywhere between. This was just him.

Why the flashbacks to his childhood? He didn’t think about being seven very much. In fact, he hardly remembered it. What was the point in all this?

His mom had been confident that he would figure out what was going on. Was that something she would have said, or was his brain trying to be optimistic? He dug his fingers into the sand, flexing in the coarse texture, and tried to take deep breaths. He still didn’t know what was going on. How was he ever going to get out of here?

Jonathan continued despite Sock’s mounting panic. "It would suck, you know. If you didn’t come back."

Sock’s breathing evened out and he warmed at Jonathan’s words. He waited for him to say more, but nothing came.

Jonathan heaved a sigh. "Sorry, this just feels really weird. I’ll be back soon. Bye?"

Sock waited a few more minutes to make sure Jonathan was really gone. It looked like this was one-way communication. Only Jonathan could talk to Sock, Sock couldn’t talk back. 

He had to get out of here, had to find a way back to Jonathan again. So far he had gone along with the memories, or dreams, or whatever they were. Maybe if he challenged them…?

A voice startled him out of his thoughts. This time it wasn’t Jonathan. A girl stood outside the sandbox, practically glaring. She was younger than Sock, but the exact age she was when he had last seen her. He paled when he recognized her face.

"Jojo?" he asked. His voice tried to sound shocked and confused at the same time, but came out wavery and kind of scared. Suddenly, he was glad that this was all in his head.

Jojo plopped into the sandbox, spraying sand all over Sock’s legs.

"Nice to meet you," she said, in that thin, aggressive way she did.

"You’re not real," Sock said. Then he shook his head, repeating like a mantra, "You’re not. Not really here, not real. I’m just in my head. I’m dreaming."

Jojo picked up a shovel and started to dig, forming a pit and a pile of sand between them. Sock watched her process rather than her face. "What makes you think that this being in your head doesn’t make it real? I think for you this is plenty real." And she looked meaningfully at the bandages on his palms. When Sock rubbed them, he still felt the sting.

"Yeah, well, you’re just a figment of my imagination," Sock reassured himself. "You’re just a memory."

Jojo stopped digging and cocked her head, watching him with open curiosity. "Does that make me any less potent?"

No. If anything, that made it worse. This was the Jojo that he remembered, and what he remembered was not always good. 

He was drawn back to the darkness beyond the trees. He could just leave. Even if it gave him a bad feeling, was it better than staying here, where he stood in place as the past flashed by him?

"I wouldn’t go there."

Sock turned to Jojo, noting the grim look on her face.

"What is it?" he asked, curiosity mixing with an instinctive sense of dread.

"Something like oblivion," Jojo replied, returning to her sand pit. "You’re not ready for it."

Sock raised an eyebrow. His brain was going all out with the cryptic statements. "When will I be ready?"

Jojo shrugged, an apathetic heave of the shoulders. "Dunno. Most never are. It’s better here anyway."

She stood, sticking out a hand for Sock to take. Sock stared at her face, the lilt of her mouth in either a smirk or a grimace, the sun directly behind her head like a blinding halo. The patron saint of his mistakes. She shook her hand again. "C’mon. Up! We’ve got games to play."

Wary of the change in demeanor, Sock took her hand. In the moment it took her to haul him to his feet, they were somewhere else. 

Sock offered her a mutilated squirrel he had worked very hard to catch and she ran away, nauseated. They shared chicken nuggets, birthday parties, classrooms. His parents found him playing with a dead bird. He made sure to keep his activities to himself after that. Each of them—mom, dad, Jojo—grew stressed as the years went by. 

Partly that was growing up. 

Partly Sock thought that was him.

There was a physicality to the knowledge that he was a lot to handle. A constant bodily anxiety that he was imposing his presence even on the people who liked him. He tried to stay small, to cover his body, to reduce how much of him there was—crushing his hair under a hat and hiding his stomach under the folds of a sweater vest. Even now, revisiting his past, he fell into the pattern. 

Jojo relieved some of it by being such a physical person, always roughhousing and tumbling around with limbs spread through the air in some sort of constant frenetic cartwheel. He couldn’t help but get caught up in it, to egg it on, even when it went south.

He caught glimpses of days passing in reality when Jonathan checked in. His timing seemed erratic, sometimes two updates within an hour and sometimes nothing for weeks. But eventually, as time blurred together in the patchwork of memories, Sock lost track, and Jonathan’s voice fell to the background. 

Revisiting his childhood in bits and pieces was almost fun. He hadn’t realized how much he missed this time and these people. The memories ran their course whether or not Sock got involved, so it was almost like watching TV, except there was a Sock-shaped hole on the screen and everything was so real. Intoxicatingly real. 

Most of the memories were good, but some were bad. The bad were so bad Sock braced himself even during the good ones for something to spontaneously go wrong. Despite the blooming self-doubts and internalized anxiety the memories imparted, Sock watched and interacted with at least a little enjoyment. It wasn’t real. This was a sandbox in his head, so he could play or sit back. 

He smiled, even if it wasn’t as much as he remembered. The culmination of these memories, the way he knew this ended, it weighed him down. But here, there weren’t any consequences and everything that went wrong had already happened. He was almost happy, almost relieved. Like Jojo promised, it was better here. 

He stopped thinking about leaving.

Another symmetrical street. Houses lining each side in darker, bluer, more somber tones than Sock’s neighborhood. Jojo was propped against a bike with streamers on the handles, unbuckling a glittery helmet and tearing it off her head.

"Helmets are so annoying," she groused. "Sock! Hurry before our parents show up!"

Sock stepped toward where another bike lay waiting for him in the street, feeling lightheaded. He knew this. He’d convinced her to do this.

"Jojo," he said quietly. "You remember what happens, right?"

She scoffed and mounted her bike. " _Do you think that will stop me?_ "

He couldn’t help a little fond smile at that. Always with that authoritative fire. "Probably not."

So they soared down the street, wind whipping their skin, cheering and laughing. Elated. Alive. Defying their parents. Turning onto a wooded dirt path, down a steep incline, feet off the pedals and hands in the air. Jojo hit a rock, like Sock knew she would, and without even a chance to shout she tumbled to the bottom of the hill. Still as death. Blood trickled from somewhere in her hair, framing her head in a puddle of red.

He remembered panicking, not sure if he should stay with her or go find an adult, eventually deciding an adult would know better what to do. And he’d left her there, bleeding out. But now, knowing this was just a memory, he crouched by her side and watched the puddle grow.

This version of Jojo knew this would happen, but didn’t do anything differently. Was that his influence on events? Or would the real Jojo really decide to leave things unchanged?

He looked around for anything different. The trees were arranged in a grid again. No matter what memory he was in, there was symmetry everywhere. Everything reflecting, everything an illusion of eternal perfection. And beyond the faultless design of his dreamworld, always there was that darkness. The point of no return.

He’d said to her, "So what if our parents said we can’t bike down the hill? They aren’t here." There was a reason they weren’t allowed, he knew it was about danger and injury. But they were kids, they were indestructible. They needed adventure, and he knew, he just knew, that this would be big.

He also knew that Jojo hated helmets.

She was dead now. Already was dead. This was a memory. But he’d made the argument and she was dead, dead, dead… 

He killed things, like squirrels and little girls. It was a mistake but it was his mistake. And that was all that Jojo came to symbolize. Everything he did wrong started here.

A voice that was not part of the memory faded into his consciousness.

"So," said Jonathan. "Day number whatever. You better be hard at work in there because I’ve been driving back and forth for hours every day. You know how hard it is to convince my mom to give me the car?"

Every day? 

Was he worth that?

Sock sat back on his haunches, looking up at the sky, imagining Jonathan’s exasperated face. "Pretty hard, probably."

"Extremely hard," Jonathan confirmed. "By the way, I asked the nurses who’s keeping you in a private room plugged in. Guess what? They actually don’t know. The person’s anonymous. Looks like you’ve got yourself a secret admirer." 

Sock raised an eyebrow at that. His parents were dead and he was pretty certain his extended family wouldn’t waste money on him after what he’d done. He did have to wonder who it was.

But he didn’t wonder too hard. He turned back to Jojo, soaking in her own liquids. Rescuers should have shown up by now. Had it really taken him this long to get help? At the time, it felt like less than a minute, everything melding together with hysteria, the consequences of his mistake flashing across his vision in split second intervals.

He blinked and he was standing before an open grave in a suit and tie. It was sunny outside, with a warm breeze. Picnic weather. A priest said a few words over a small coffin. Someone nearby lost all their composure. 

A knife twisted in his gut.

He’d convinced her to do this.

Jonathan said Sock’s name softly, hesitantly, as Sock was in that split-second transition from one scene to the next. Turned out he was on his bed and the room was dark. Somehow, he knew Jojo’s funeral was only days ago, that it was night, and that he hadn’t been able to sleep since then.

"Maybe I shouldn’t have done this without your permission, I don’t know, but I looked up your family online." There was a pause where Jonathan seemed to decide to do this bluntly. "It says you killed your parents and then tried to kill yourself. That’s… I dunno, Sock. That’s really big." He released a puff of air. "I’ll be back, just maybe not tomorrow."

Sock squeezed his eyes shut. He never wanted Jonathan to know.

Voices filtered through his door from the kitchen downstairs. Sock didn’t have to strain very hard to hear. He already knew what they were saying anyway. He’d committed the words to memory the moment he’d heard them.

"Something’s wrong with him," his dad said, hushed and quick. Like he was a dirty secret, the skeleton in the family closet. The statement echoed, multiplied, reflected itself.

 _Something’s wrong with him_.

 _Something’s wrong with him_.

_Something’s wrong…_

His mom protested. "Don’t say that. He’s just having a difficult time with his friend’s death."

"Yes, but, remember when he was killing those animals? We found him chasing things with a knife. His reaction isn’t normal."

"No. Most of that was a long time ago. He’ll grow out of it. Dear, you know he’s just… different." She sounded unsure.

Maybe, Sock thought. But Jojo was still his fault. Wherever she was now, he didn't doubt that she hated him, too.

Aside from the couple occasions where Sock was caught red handed with a dead animal or a dirty knife, he hadn’t heard what his parents thought of his hobbies. He already knew from the shock and disgust and concern that they didn’t understand and never would. But to hear them talking when they thought he couldn’t hear, arguing for and against him, emphasizing how different he was and how bad that was and how he might never be what they wanted… 

He curled up on the bed, breath shallow as he tried to keep the despair inside. He’d lost Jojo, his parents, and Jonathan. The nature of this place mashed all of those instances together into one horrible moment. He was in his bedroom, this was supposed to be home, yet… 

_Something’s wrong with me_.

He wished he was somewhere else.

[G]

Gravestones dotted the hilly landscape, arranged like the trees into precise squares. Those closest to him, labeled Mom, Dad, and ME, broke the pattern. Except for the void where the scene ended, it was light despite it being nighttime, because the moon was full and high. He puffed little clouds into the air. He knew his arms ached because he’d spent hours digging graves and tossing bodies inside.

"Okay," Sock said aloud, to no one and everything. To this place. To the inevitable.

His knife was already in his hand.

He felt like this was a movie he watched again and again, always hoping that the characters would do something different. That his favorite wouldn’t die this time. But it was a movie, their path was already set, and they never stood a chance.

That bodily anxiety, the urge to shrink, to make himself go away, made his grip strong.

He huffed one last breath and pushed the knife into his abdomen, every muscle tensed in anticipation. Pain was real here, even if everything else wasn’t.

Except, nothing happened.

He blinked open eyes he hadn’t even realized he’d closed and saw that the knife handle was sticking out of him. When he pulled it out, the blade materialized an inch at a time and disappeared again when he pushed it back in. The metal never touched him.

Suddenly he was blazingly, blindingly angry. 

" _What am I supposed to learn from this?!_ " Sock shouted into the distance. His voice bounced off the gravestones and disappeared into the emptiness beyond the graveyard. It raged, it roared. He was surprised it didn’t knock over every stone. "What do you want me to do?!"

It was supposed to end here, like this. He was supposed to go away, escape, disappear. He was supposed to get what he deserved, to pay up for every mistake.

Throwing the knife to the ground, he curled up nearby in the dewy grass, immediately soaked with cold and water. He remembered how cold this night had been, because his fingers had practically frozen into claws from dragging his parents and then shoveling out their graves. He’d seen his breath mist the air. He’d thought for a second that he should have brought his coat, but then he remembered what he came here to do and he decided it didn’t matter if he was cold, because he wouldn’t feel it for long.

Now his face was wet. Wet and hot. He rubbed the moisture away and realized what he thought was dew was actually tears, and that he was crying, and that he was frustrated and exhausted and he wanted to go home, even if he didn’t know where that was.

He clutched his head, burying his face in the space between his knees and his chest. He could lie here, stay here forever, in whatever limbo this was, in this place where he could go without food or shelter or water, and he would never have to face anyone again. Not his parents or Jojo or Jonathan. It wasn’t home, but it was the safest place he knew right now. Maybe that would be enough.

A second passed. Or an hour. The terrible, oppressive silence threatened to pop his eardrums and crush his ribcage. Whatever dream physics ruled this place allowed the cold to burn into his bones but not numb his phantom nerves, so he was painfully aware of each inch the cold claimed of his body.

It was ironic that after all the doctors had done to save him—the induced coma, the multiple surgeries, the nurse who tucked hair behind the body’s ear with such familiarity—his final resting place would still be here, this moment. Forever.

A breeze whispered past his ear. And again. It was Jonathan, back at his bedside.

"Sock," he seemed to coax, voice soft and gentle. Sock curled up tighter in an attempt to block it out. 

"Sock," Jonathan said again. "Is this thing on?" He chuckled quietly and despite himself, Sock raised his head and watched the moon, like maybe he could see Jonathan’s open, smiling face in the craters. 

He smiled back before he caught himself, a small watery thing that struggled to maintain itself. Then he scowled and wiped at his wet face again. Jonathan didn’t smile, especially not at Sock, and he wasn’t supposed to be here. He knew everything now. This moment was Sock’s alone.

This was how it was supposed to end for him.

"So, the nurses say your vitals are looking good. I’m glad. In other news, I cracked the screen of my iPhone, can you believe it? It sucks. Mom says she won’t get a replacement unless it’s really broken, so I’ve still got to use it for now. I think she’s just waiting for the new iPhone to come out so she can give me her old one..."

Sock rested his cheek on his arms, trying to read Jonathan’s pause. It didn’t seem like he was done talking yet, but he wasn’t saying anything else. He hoped the new iPhone came out soon, so Jonathan could get one with a functional screen. All his music was on that phone, and Sock knew he couldn’t live a second without the soothing screams of Valhalla Soundbox’s lead singer.

The life update was nice and routine, Sock was glad Jonathan still bothered even after what he had learned, but it was all going to be for nothing. Sock could know bits and pieces of Jonathan out there, in the real world, but Sock was staying in here, frozen in time, and hearing Jonathan’s life keep going. It kind of hurt. 

Sock wouldn’t get that—a tomorrow, a next week, a when-the-new-iPhone-comes-out. 

Jonathan released a heavy sigh, belying his stress. "I’m still not sure if you can even hear me, but I’ve got to give it a shot. The nurses keep saying it’s good to talk to you. And this is something you really have to know."

Sock gripped his elbows, fingers stiff with cold, skin burning, joints cracking. If he wasn’t already curled as far as he could go, he would have wound himself tighter, protecting his abdomen and head from the impending blow. 

_Something’s wrong with me_.

This was it. This was when Jonathan gave up on him.

"Take your time, Sock," Jonathan said instead. "I mean, I really want to see you sooner rather than later, especially so you can give me your side of the story, but I have no idea what’s going on in there. So, I’ll be here."

No. He had to be hearing wrong.

"I think…" Jonathan continued, with a hesitant pause. "I think a lot of people gave up on you, and I think you gave up on yourself in the end. You can’t do that again, Sock. You are almost incapable of giving up—I don’t know anyone as persistent as Sock Sowachowski." A laugh. A private joke between demon and human counterpart. "I don’t befriend people lightly. Especially demons from Hell. I’ll be here when you’re ready. Count on it."

Sock flinched when the burning cold of his left hand smoothed to a milder, more comforting heat. He stretched his fingers experimentally and then clutched at the air, seeking the heat. He found it, disembodied and invisible, and it gripped him firmly.

"Jonathan?" Sock wondered. He imagined (he hoped) Jonathan reached out to grab the body’s hand in reassurance.

Jonathan would still touch him, even after all this.

Hot tears squeezed between his eyelids as he struggled to get his feet under himself. He rubbed his face to get back some control. Sock picked up the knife and flipped it side to side, looking for any sort of clue. Killing himself got him nowhere. Up until now, following through with how the memories actually happened was enough to get him to the next destination. But this place was special: this was the end. And obviously, it was supposed to happen different this time, if his suicide didn’t satisfy.

What could he have done differently?

If he wasn’t going to die, then he was going to live. If he wasn’t going to be alone, he had to find someone. 

He had to find Jonathan.

Sock peered down the hill, past the cemetary gates, and at the empty street and the void beyond. The first part was easy: he dropped the knife. Then he took a step toward the street, away from the open graves and his parents. He looked back once, at the shovel, the knife, the holes. The gravestone labeled ME. This was what his life had amounted to in the end. He was leaving it all behind.

Absurdly, he was reminded of a Sunday school lesson about Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt when she looked back at their damned city. He laughed an actual chest-heaving, hysterical laugh. God wasn’t involved in his life. It was the exact opposite deity.

With a little more feeling back in his limbs, he made it to the street, the edge of the dreamscape. For a few seconds, he breathed slow, measured breaths as he peered into the darkness. There was no coming back from there.

He stepped off the street and into the dark.

For some reason he was braced to plunge—it wasn’t like there was any visible ground—but instead, his feet connected with a solid surface. The graveyard scene behind him shimmered and wobbled like a reflection on water. The image jumbled into a colorful kaleidoscope of different settings he’d re-lived. He took a few steps back and it became apparent that it was a lone island of color and light. It faded into nothing as he watched, until it was only black as far as he could see. Reaching out, he tried to feel for something, anything. A wall or a tree, some sort of man-made or natural structure. But it was just as he’d suspected every time he looked at the dark.

Nothing.

He waved a hand in front of his face, only able to see a vague outline of the appendage. 

Nothing but him.

"Okay, Sowachowski," he muttered to himself. "This is you. Just get a grip."

It figured he was full of darkness.

He chose a direction and began walking. His boots were soundless against the invisible surface and his breathing seemed harsh and too close in the silence. Something about this place made him tread carefully. Although the ground was clearly flat and wide, the emptiness on either side of him made him feel like he was walking a tightrope, just barely balanced between living and dying.

He supposed being trapped in his comatose body’s mind would qualify as walking the line between life and death.

But, he’d decided, right? He’d thrown down the knife and left the graveyard. He would live or die trying. He’d get back to Jonathan.

He’d find home.

A tear of frustration dripped down his face and he squeezed his eyes shut against more. Through all the memories—confronting everything in his past, deciding once again to end everything in that graveyard—he still ended up here, trying to find his way back to his friend. Jonathan, who, like an unwitting angel, had somehow got through to him in a coma and even his final moments.

Jonathan had said Sock was incapable of giving up, but really, Sock’s decision to kill himself versus Jonathan’s persistent talking to his unresponsive body? Jonathan was the one who never gave up. And Jonathan believed in Sock’s perseverance. He was not going to let his counterpart down.

Time didn’t mean anything in this place. Sock walked for what could have been ten minutes or ten days. It didn’t matter, since he never grew tired or hungry or bored. He just marched, maybe going in circles, maybe one straight line, maybe staying in place. Always balancing. There was no beckoning and no Jonathan. Nothing to tell him what to do or where to go.

He had no idea what he was doing.

With a guttural cry torn out of the ball of frustration festering in his stomach, he lashed out at the darkness in front of him, wishing with everything he had that he could impact something. Anything, at this point. That he wasn’t walking pointlessly for all eternity.

His hand cracked against something smooth and cold, sending a shock of pain up his arm. He instantly forgot it in favor of what materialized in front of him.

It seemed like a pane of glass, wider than Sock was tall and taller than Sock could see, stretching into the darkness above like Mephistopheles’ eternal filing cabinets. It looked like a window or a mirror without a frame. Tentatively, he spread his uninjured hand across the glass, shivering at the icy cold it radiated. It felt like, if he allowed it, it could freeze him in place, into a far deeper sleep than Sock had sought in the graveyard.

"But that’s not what I want," Sock told it, pushing every ounce of determination into his voice. "I want…" The beckoning. Jonathan. "I want to go home." His voice cracked.

Dim scenes flashed across the pane like reflections from a dark room. His family’s suburban lasagne dinner, Jojo’s reckless smiles, Jonathan laughing. It settled on the body’s sleeping face, his real life reflection. Eyes closed, dark circles above sunken cheeks, skin pale as death, hair tamed, for once.

Oh, he thought. His mom said he would figure it out. 

_This is you, it is you, that’s me_. It wasn’t so hard to believe anymore. He looked beaten down and sucked dry. In the face of everything he’d always been so cheerful. Rehashing these memories with the knowledge of how they ended had dimmed the joy he’d felt while alive. His relentless positivity, his persistence. Everything Jonathan believed he had, enough to wait for him to wake up to explain himself.

Everything he had abandoned when he gave up. 

He thought haltingly, like he was pulling the leash of an unwilling dog, that this might have something to do with rejection. How he’d rejected himself. That if he was going to live, if he was going to go home, he had to accept the body. He had to stop, rewind, and redo the whole thing with one major difference: in the end he didn’t choose to reduce himself anymore.

How much more reduced could he get than being a ghost?

The cold, he thought. The deeper sleep the mirror offered. Jojo said it was something like oblivion. It was a choice he could make.

The echo of that blinding anger when the knife failed him made his gut cold. He’d tried to make things right, to make up for all his mistakes—Jojo, his parents, himself. But he wasn’t even allowed that. He could make that final decision again. He could choose.

But… 

Jonathan believed in him. He even chose to be his friend, chose to help him feel real, chose to visit every day. Sock had to choose too. 

He’d already made this decision in the graveyard.

He wanted to reach out and touch.

So he did.

With both hands extended, he pressed against the glass until his body heat spread enough to melt through the barrier. The cold retreated, the darkness narrowed to a single point. Sock leaned toward the reflection, his body, now clear as day with the glass removed, and gathered it against him. Gathered himself against him, burying his face in his neatly combed hair, leaving marks of pink heat on his pale skin, practically liquefying into the embrace, into a hug so warm it burned.

Burned his lungs, burned his muscles, burned his eyes. Burned the darkness away.

Sound rushed into his awareness all at once. Mechanical chirping, dry susurration, television static, a sweeping symphony of starlight and a familiar voice. It was overwhelming after the prolonged silence, and Sock wanted a moment to adjust, wanted to go home. That was all he wanted. He wished the commotion would go away.

And so it did.

[H]

Weight settled across his body, head to toe. Dimly he was aware of rhythmic beeping nearby. It wasn’t the beckoning and it wasn’t Jonathan’s voice, so it didn’t matter.

It was dark and pinkish. Just a fuzzy pinkish plane as far as he could see, almost like the sky of the first mirror world. Maybe the pinkishness was what was pressing him into the ground. Sock opened his mouth to see how sound carried, but he couldn’t get his jaw or lips to work. In his shock, he realized his eyes were closed, and with monumental effort, millimeter by millimeter, he wrenched his eyelids open.

There was a popcorn ceiling. That made more sense than a dark pinkish plane. His neck was locked in place, so he rolled his eyes to see the rest of the room. To the right there was equipment—gently glowing screens, a superhighway of cords and tubes fanning out behind them. Beyond that, a pale green curtain.

It was the left that interested him. His eyes wouldn’t focus for long, so everything was blurry. But the shape next to his bed looked like a person. A shadowy seated person. 

Who would be beside him while he was like this?

Someone was pounding on the wall, an insistent beat like a bass drum. It sped up once the person’s head moved. He couldn’t hear over the beat, but the person stood up, rushed to the bed, moved their lips.

Blood. The pounding was his blood in his veins. His heartbeat.

He was alive.

And the person who reached out to take his hand, mindful of the IVs, was… 

"‘ohn…" Sock scraped the syllables out of his aching, dry throat. _Jonathan_ , he tried to say. _You’re here_.

Sock’s vision cleared enough to see Jonathan’s hesitant smile and the relief in his eyes.

"Yeah," he said, squeezing Sock’s hand. Only now did he realize he couldn’t feel much with it, aside from the heat of Jonathan’s skin. He couldn’t squeeze back. "I said I’d be here."

Jonathan’s voice and the beckoning were overlaid. Two channels on the radio fading into one another. Both were the most beautiful sounds he’d ever heard. But while the beckoning started to fade, each tinkling star winking out with one last joyful chime, Jonathan’s voice stayed warm and steady. Sock found that he didn’t even mourn the loss, because the beckoning… home. It was holding his hand.

Sock managed to jerk his body upwards an inch before falling back into the mattress with a grunt. His muscles were unresponsive, weighing him down like cinder blocks strapped to his limbs. If he didn’t know what it was really like, he’d say his body felt dead. While in the dreamworld everything was almost painfully tactile, his skin was now insensate, pulled taut across his flesh and bones and completely numb to everything but the slight heat of Jonathan’s hand. If he hadn’t visually identified that his body was under covers of a bed, he wouldn’t have been able to tell now. 

It was almost like walking endlessly in the dark. In the nothing. Unable to touch because there was only emptiness. It was so close, in fact, that in a moment of blind desperate panic, a moment of _I’m still there and I never left and I’m in that place forever_ , his body seized. One of the machines began to chime faster and faster. His chest ached. Jonathan gripped him tighter and said something that sounded worried, but everything was drowned out by the sound of his rushing blood. 

Sock’s arm spasmed. Something jingled to the right, like metal against the bed rail. He flicked his eyes and tilted his chin to get a look.

His wrist was handcuffed to the bed. Panting through his nose, Sock managed to raise an eyebrow and look back to Jonathan, who searched Sock’s face and shrugged one shoulder, careful not to jostle him.

"You opened your eyes for a bit, but you weren’t really… there. They thought you might fully wake up soon. Technically, you’re still a wanted man. Although I don’t know what they think you could do after lying in bed for so long." 

Sock hummed low in his throat to confirm he hadn’t forgotten. Way to bring reality crashing back down. 

Jonathan paused, then continued in a tight voice. "Most coma patients don’t wake up if it’s been more than a few weeks so they weren’t prepared for this. Not sure I was prepared either…" His words wobbled at the end, then he seemed to pull himself together. Pursed lips split into another rare smile. He squinted when he did that and his eyes crinkled at the edges. It was more than a "I’ve finally got a moment to myself," "I got a nice text," "I found something funny online" smile.

This was a "my friend is alive" smile.

Sock’s lips were numb but he knew he managed something resembling a smile when Jonathan’s only widened.

"I told you!" his nurse exclaimed as she rushed into Sock’s eyesight, gently moving Jonathan to the side to make room for more staff. He must have hit the call button. "He needed something to wake up for."

Jonathan still held Sock’s hand as he moved and gave a light but happy scoff to the nurse.

"I think he did this all by himself, ma’am."

No, Sock thought, as people began prodding him and asking yes or no questions. It was definitely a team effort. He would still be in that graveyard without Jonathan.

He’d still be asleep without himself, too.

[I]

After a week of physical therapy, Sock regained most of his neck, arm, and hand motion. Sitting up was still a challenge, and he still needed an escort for the bathroom, but the doctors promised that with more physical therapy he’d get his muscles back. Although they couldn’t say much about his future outside that. He’d already seen a lawyer twice.

Jonathan knocked on the open door to announce his arrival, face impassive as usual. They had been talking earlier about Sock’s incident with his parents and with Jojo. His childhood in general. But visiting hours were up soon, and it was a school night. Jonathan hefted his bag onto his shoulder and leaned over the bed rail to pull Sock into a careful hug. Sock hugged back as hard as he could, although without his full strength, it probably felt very faint to Jonathan. They broke off smiling anyway.

"Oh," Jonathan said, rummaging in his bag. He emerged with a plain white envelope and handed it to Sock. "This was in our mailbox."

Sock turned the envelope over. There was no address or return address. It was simply addressed to Sock in looping, curly script. His skin prickled, and the back of his neck went cold, like he could feel someone watching him. He should open it, see what it was about, but he put it on his lap instead. Something told him he should wait until Jonathan was gone.

"You should get home, Jonathan. Before the nurses kick you out again."

Jonathan rolled his eyes and made for the door, throwing over his shoulder, "Is this gonna be you now? Actually caring about my wellbeing?"

Sock considered for a moment while Jonathan waited in the threshold. He’d cared about Jonathan when he was a demon too, but managed to bury that for the most part. He didn’t think he’d stop tormenting Jonathan completely, but Jonathan’s observation was right. Sock was really expressing his concern now. He shrugged with forced nonchalance and gripped the envelope in his lap. 

It was no big deal. Of course he cared about Jonathan. They were friends, counterparts. Not to mention that Jonathan had practically saved Sock’s life.

He was home.

"Yeah," Sock said. "I think it will be. Most of the time."

"Most of the time," Jonathan muttered with a shake of the head. "Goodnight, Sock."

"Night, Jonathan."

The moment the door latched shut, Sock had the envelope open. There was just a card inside. Dark, crisp, heavy cardstock. In the same loopy script, it said:

The disappearing knife was probably my best trick. Enjoy it while it lasts, kid. I’ll see you soon. -M

**Author's Note:**

> [Maybe the real beckoning was the friends we made along the way.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHEOF_rcND8)
> 
> Drop a comment or a kudos! Tell me what you liked or how this felt! I love hearing from someone who will spend time reading my stuff. I've seen this fic so many times I don't know what it's like anymore, but to experience it from your perspective is like hearing it for the first time again. Find me on Tumblr as pingnova.


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